Unrequited
by Caeli Quaedem
Summary: They were drawn like moths to a flame. (He's a star, but this isn't about Combeferre.)


**Hi! This is a drabble and if nothing makes sense then I'm terribly sorry. I ship neither Eponine/Marius nor Enjolras/Grantaire, but I think the dynamic of those two relationships could do with some comparison. Writing this has been extremely interesting. Please don't favorite without reviewing even if just to copy and paste your favorite line.**

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_**unrequited**__ /adj/ not requited; not reciprocated or returned in kind _

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He was bright, happily burning and spreading warmth throughout her dangerously thin body with everything he does. It really was too bad that the sole person who illuminates her dark, god-forsaken world can't see her.

He was flame, fire, fierce belief and everything Grantaire thought cannot possibly be contained in a mortal. Sometimes, it was all the cynical drunk can do not to let himself get burned by the heat in his flashing eyes.

Marius Pontmercy was good and honest and true and although she could not understand why anyone would willingly leave behind bourgeois luxuries, she loves him all the same. He reminds her that there is still beauty and righteousness and kindness somewhere in the disaster that is the human race, and it's the thought of him that allows her to hope and hold on to the will to live when filthy hands lashing out and shards of broken glass threaten to pull her apart.

Gabriel Enjolras was so, so beautiful in his severity and ruthlessness and unquenchable thirst for a visionary society and he really didn't think it was fair for him to be all that. Grantaire loses him every single day he surrenders to the more welcoming embrace of absinthe, but he's pretty sure his Apollo would be able to pull him out into the light only he sees if he so chooses.

Loads of bumbling awkwardness and yes, the occasional naivety can be found in the law student's persona, but Éponine found ways to consider those adorable. After all, naivety was a vanity she can't afford if she is to reach at least twenty years of age; and the cruel, sudden way she was exposed to the horrors of reality and human survival is a fate she's eternally grateful the young man would never have to endure.

So he considers the whole population of France his mistress, so what? The lost and purposeless artist has no right to judge what seems to be his leader's unshakeable belief in the people, but he does so anyway. Mocking him and riling him up is the only way he can get a reaction out of his Apollo, and that's way better than dwelling in the visions that haunt him at night where Enjolras doesn't acknowledge his existence at all.

Alouette. That was what she'd called the fair-haired ghost of her childhood that had come to haunt her present. It was bad enough that she'd lost everything that was hers, now Cosette had come to take away what wasn't.

He didn't believe in anything, except that maybe there was only one way this could all end- in bloodshed. For all the years that the silver-tongued orator's fight for _liberty, equality and fraternity_ sustained his will to live, it might just be the very thing that would kill him in the end.

She takes the letter to the Lark. Of course she does. Anything for Monsieur Marius. And if she happens to see what she could've been in the blonde swimming in finery, well she was no stranger to the disappointments of life, and no wistful looks pass over her dirtied features. In another life, maybe, in another life.

The night before they build the barricades, that great monument to their inevitable heroic deaths, he dares not do anything out of the ordinary. He gets himself utterly drunk and teases the marble man until his eyes flash with that beloved, ferocious intensity. It might be his last time to get burned by it, after all.

Her death was probably the most amazing gift God on high had given her. Being held in Monsieur Marius' arms was way better than drowning by her lonesome self in the freezing river, but she never imagined that she would feel as light as she did when he finally let go. She hopes he won't follow her soon to this place. Her prince, at least, deserves his happy ending.

He saw the Jondrette girl fall. He saw the light enter and leave her eyes and felt the chill that descended on his friends upon the realization that innocents would be killed on their barricade. But he knew better. He knew why she came and it was almost the same reason that he could not bring himself to leave. Almost.

He was scared shitless mere moments before he died. Not because, y'know he was going to die, but that for the first time in his life, he saw the unfamiliar flicker of fear color Enjolras' eyes, so different from the idealistic brilliance he usually found there that he was genuinely worried the world is coming to an end. There's a bottle in his hand, Enjolras is a few meters away facing his death alone and fuck it, he's not going to let him pull a Prouvaire on him. Really, the feel of his hand in his was enough to compensate for the liquor that spilt on the floor when the bottle slipped listlessly from his hand as he joined him by the window.

They were drawn to what they can't have, to the light and fire and _goodness_ that they themselves lack, that they feel they don't deserve, and if it was in death that they can get even just a taste of that, then so be it.


End file.
